The interest in the deployment of routers and virtual private networks (VPNs) across IP backbone facilities is growing every-day. Typically, routers and service processing switches include many network components (NCs). The software that deals with these components typically requires data that describes the component and the configuration of components within the system. In previous systems, this data has been either hard coded into the software or class definitions associated with the software, or it has been provided in an Interface Definition Language (IDL) that must be interpreted.
There are several problems with the techniques described above. First, if the data is hard coded into software or the class definitions associated with the software, the software must be recompiled every time a change is made to the metadata. This can be problematic, because it is often necessary to support multiple versions of the software and hardware associated with the router or service processing switch. These multiple versions arise due to changes in product versions, changes in supported features, and changes in hardware versions. In previous systems, these changes required recompiling and rebuilding the software, or reinterpreting the IDL to produce new source code that must be built into the system. Furthermore, because the source code changes, it is necessary to retest the software that uses the metadata.